University Of North
Carolina Protesters Knock Over 1913 Pro-Confederate 'Silent Sam' Statue
ByBen Shapiro
@benshapiro
August 21, 2018
On
Monday evening, students at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
toppled “Silent Sam,” a 1913 statue placed on campus in memoriam of the 300
alumni who served in the Confederate Army. A group formed at 7:00 p.m. to
protest the statue and stand up in favor of Maya Little, a student who
allegedly dumped red paint and blood on the base of the statue in April. Little stated,
“It’s time to build monuments to honor those who have been murdered by white
supremacy. It’s time to tear down Silent Sam. It’s time to tear down UNC’s
institutional white supremacy.”
Around 9:20, according to the university, “a group from
among an estimated crowd of 250 protesters brought down the Confederate
Monument on the campus of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Tonight’s actions were dangerous, and we are very fortunate that no one was
injured. We are investigating the vandalism and assessing the full extent of
the damage.” Police arrested only one student for resisting arrest and
concealing his or her face (the sex of the suspect has not been released).
Governor Roy Cooper’s (D-NC) office stated, “The Governor
understands that many people are frustrated by the pace of change and he shares
their frustration, but violent destruction of public property has no place in
our communities.”
The statue’s history is truly disturbing. Julian Carr, a
local KKK member who helped dedicate the statue, said
at the time:
There are no words that I have been able to find in the
vocabulary of the English language that adequately express my feelings in this
presence on this occasion… But you know and I know, that though I might speak
with the tongue of men and of angels, neither song nor story could fittingly
honor this glorious event. ... One hundred yards from where we stand, less than
ninety days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a negro
wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet
village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady, and then rushed
for protection to these University buildings where was stationed a garrison of
100 Federal soldiers. I performed the pleasing duty in the immediate presence
of the entire garrison, and for thirty nights afterwards slept with a double-barrel
shot gun under my head.
This history is vital. And that’s part of the problem
with removing monuments like this: it tears away our history, both evil and
good. As Condoleezza Rice correctly explained:
I am a firm believer in "keep your history before
you" and so I don't actually want to rename things that were named for
slave owners … I want us to have to look at those names and recognize what they
did and to be able to tell our kids what they did and for them to have a sense
of their own history. When you start wiping out your history, sanitizing your
history to make you feel better it's a bad thing.
UNC isn’t represented by Julian Carr, and any suggestion
to the contrary is deeply intellectually dishonest. When Julian Carr spoke, the
authorities protected the criminality of groups like the KKK; when UNC students
tore down that statue 105 years later, the authorities protected them. That’s a
complete reversal — and in terms of opposing white supremacy, a great one, of
course.
But it isn’t good that people are destroying public
property in a democracy, without the law applying. When protesters tore down
statues of Stalin in the former Soviet Union or Saddam Hussein in Iraq, they
did so because there was no legal regime from which to seek redress. That
simply isn’t true in the United States. There’s a case to be made for removing
statues from public property by legislative act, but there’s no case to be made
for vandalism, which undermines the principle of actual democratic change. Mobs
are not what democracy looks like.
Furthermore, this particular mob wasn’t especially
tolerant, at least in the words of one UNC student who wrote to me about the
situation:
I am a freshman at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. … Tonight, students tore down a confederate statue on campus that
is known as Silent Sam. “Peaceful protesters” acted just like their name
suggests and destroyed this piece of history, chanting “black power” and “go
away cops” when police arrived on the scene. I walked by to see what I figured
was going to be national news and that was probably not the smartest thing for
me to do. Almost immediately, they started coming at me, yelling “get out of
here whitey,” which I found ironic as they were holding a sign that said “from
Durham to Charlottesville to the White House, tear down racism.” Needless to
say I ran back to my dorm pretty darn fast.
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